BOSTON (AP) — Samuel P. Huntington, a political scientist best known for his views on the clash of civilizations, died Wednesday on Martha’s Vineyard. He was 81.

His death was announced Saturday by Harvard University, where he taught for 58 years before retiring from active teaching in 2007. His research and teaching focused on American government, democratization, military politics, strategy and civil-military relations.

Mr. Huntington argued that in a post-cold-war world, violent conflict would come not from ideological friction between nations, but from cultural and religious differences among the world’s major civilizations.

He identified those civilizations as Western (including the United States and Europe), Latin American, Islamic, African, Orthodox (with Russia as a core state), Hindu, Japanese and “Sinic” (including China, Korea and Vietnam).

He made the argument in a 1993 article in the journal Foreign Affairs and then expanded the thesis into a book, “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,” published in 1996. The book has been translated into 39 languages.

Mr. Huntington wrote 17 books, including “The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations,” published in 1957 and inspired by President Harry S. Truman’s firing of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, and “Political Power: USA/USSR,” a study of cold war dynamics, which he wrote in 1964 with Zbigniew Brzezinski.

His 1969 book “Political Order in Changing Societies” analyzed political and economic development in the third world.

Mr. Huntington was born on April 18, 1927, in New York City. He received a bachelor’s degree from Yale in 1946, served in the Army, earned a master’s from the University of Chicago in 1948 and received a doctorate from Harvard in 1951.

La notizia data dalla stampa italiana: il Corriere della Sera (anche qui e qui) ed il Sole24ore.

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